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“Oh, don’t pout.” Finn crowds my space, stretching his arm to nudge a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. “You still got your stuff back in the end, didn’t you?”
As much as I despise him in this moment, I hate that I stopped hating him even more. For a moment there, I thought I’d gotten through to him, but now?
I know without a shadow of a doubt…
The only way I’m going to survive this summer is by hating him as much as he hates me.
* * *
I’m cursed. No other explanation.
You’d think I’d be used to this by now—being woken up in the middle of the night, only for something to go terribly wrong—but nope,I’m just as shocked as I was the night I found Finn standing in the library window.
Lexie barking is my first clue.
The sound of a key being inserted into the front lock is my second. Lying on the couch with widened eyes, I grip the blanket that’s wrapped around me. What was I thinking, falling asleep on the couch?
I know it’s not Finn.
He came home and went up to his room long before I put on a romantic comedy and passed out. Can’t be Theo either. He showed up to gather the rest of his stuff around dinnertime.
Who else could have a key?
Brody, perhaps?
Lexie barks louder when the front door squeaks open, and two unknown voices pervade the entryway. Lexie’s barking quickly evolves into growling.
“Fucking hell,” a masculine voice huffs. “Get her to shut up.”
Another deep voice, this one husky, cuts in. “Lexie, come here, girl.”
The growling stops instantly.
I hear Lexie’s paws rattling the wooden floors as she runs to the stranger without a second thought, and I understand…
There’s no way that’s a stranger.
She knows him.
She’s licking his face, jumping on him—the whole shebang—as I lie there, stiff as a plank. They can’t see me since the couch faces away from the kitchen, but I’m not taking any chances.
“I know, I know. I’ve been gone for a hot minute, huh?”
“Jesus, Emery, how do you do that? I can’t pet her without her trying to bite my dick off,” the other guy comments.
My brain short-circuits at the mention of his name.
Emery.
As in… Xavier Emery, Finn’s best friend?
That’s how Lexie knows him.
I thought he was away at basketball camp?
“And that would be a bad thing because?” Xavier heaves a bitter scoff, earning himself a “fuck you” from his companion.
They’ve barely taken a few steps into the kitchen before Mystery Guy asks, “Wheredid Finn say he was again?”
